AN ODE TO HUMAN INTERACTION

For some years now, when driving on busy highways there are inevitable moments when we need to merge to a right-hand lane to easily get off at our exit. Maybe there’s a touch of paranoia here, but it feels to us that as soon as we signal to move from our lane to the right, the car on the other lane seems to speed up and not slow down. Our trick – and this works much of the time – is to have the one of us in the passenger seat open the window and put out a hand to signal our intentions.

Suddenly we’ve become human beings not just slabs of metal, and more often than not, we’re able to merge without effort.

This little bit of life experience came to mind when we were listening to George Saunders, the writer best known for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” when he was interviewed by David Marchese on the New York Times’ podcast, “The Daily.”

Saunders was, he said, dismayed by “The rate at which we're being encouraged to forgo human-to-human activity.” He went on to remark on the number of daily interactions he experiences that are impersonal. “It’s skyrocketed and I think it’s corrosive,” he said.

In the old days when we did interviews for magazines, frequently we’d make arrangements to meet the interviewee in person in their office and sometimes their homes (we were particularly delighted when then Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker served us tea in the governor’s mansion). Relationships with people we’ve met in person, we can attest, tend to last longer, be stronger, and engender more mutual trust than those that are developed on the telephone, or even worse through e-mails and worst of all through texts.

There are a great many advantages when people can conduct transactions with their state or local government through websites or online forms. But increasing technological interactions can also risk creating de-personalized government. And when technology isn’t perfectly attuned to a person’s needs – and nobody can be reached in person – that doesn’t help the public servants to gain the appreciation they deserve. 

A similar phenomenon can be clearly seen in the workplace. While we understand the need and the benefits of remote work (we’ve been working out of our home for decades), there’s something missing when co-workers aren’t able to communicate in person. In our experience, people are more inclined to cooperate with one another when they actually have a sense that they know one another. Even small talk, which seems like a waste of time, can bring out commonalties that forge relationships and nurture collaboration.

For some years, we were contractors for the Pew Charitable Trusts, working on a long series of projects. Though most of our communications took place through e-mails or phone calls, we made a point of visiting the office in Washington D.C. (or earlier on, in Philadelphia.) for a couple of days every month. Naturally, most of our time was taken up in formal meetings, but in between scheduled interactions, we’d wander down the halls, finding colleagues who were in their offices and weren’t too busy to chat.

We enjoyed these conversations, but we also knew that when it came time to collaborate on a project, these face-to-face interactions led to the kind of relationships that made decisions easier to reach. They engendered mutual trust.

That was an unusual kind of situation, but we’re confident that face-to-face conversations that are entirely about work are often rather productive. For one thing, body language can help to diminish misunderstandings. Even virtual meetings limit the value that can be gained when watching someone else’s hands turn into fists, a sure sign that something may be going awry.

Based on a great many off-the-record conversations that we’ve had with people in state or local government, we’ve heard that the lack of human interaction can easily lead to stressful communication with a supervisor, and unhappiness at the job. Getting negative feedback, in written form or even on the phone, can easily make it difficult to understand how serious a problem is.

One way in which people in the public sector can help fend off the impact of a faceless society is by attending conferences. When more than one person from an organization attends, there’s an easy opportunity to engage with one another in a way that will pay off when everyone returns home. Additionally, the chance to spend time with people from other jurisdictions opens the door to learning practices, programs, policies and management techniques that are working elsewhere.

We have to admit that, with the exception of conferences, given the nature of our work, we tend to fall into the category of people who don’t have much chance to have real in-person contacts. Even some of the organizations with which we work lack an office to visit – the work is all done online.

Certainly, there’s an efficiency that can be gained by the current state of affairs. Joni Mitchell wrote a beautiful song called Both Sides Now, in which one lyric is “Well somethings lost but something’s gained in living every day.”

In this case, we’d like to flip around those words and, suggest that in this case, the lyric could be changed to “Somethings gained but something’s lost in living every day.”

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